Web feeds, in particular syndication web feeds, are widely used on the internet in particular, for informing users on the content available (summary of articles published on the website) in order to advise them on the updating of contents (photographs, updating of software, etc) on a website or for delivering structured information such as weather forecasts. These feeds are generally published by the website in question and accessible to users who have subscribed to these feeds, through in particular a web feed aggregator or a web feed reader.
Web feeds take the form of a document, generally based on the XML (“eXtensible Markup Language”) format, defining in a first part a set of properties relating to this feed (for example its name, the address at which it can be found, or the date of last updating), and then, in a second part, a set of entries associated with the contents.
Each entry of the web feed describes content elements (or “items”) by means of a unique identifier within the web feed and information relating to the content: for example, a publication date, a title, possible a summary and other details. Thus each entry represents one or more content elements (article, photograph, etc) published on one or more web servers.
Because these web feeds are written in a standard XML format intended to describe the publication of a content, the web feeds can easily be processed by applications, unlike HTML (“HyperText Markup Language”) files that are displayed in a web browser when an internet site is consulted.
Applications have thus been able to see the light of day, for example the one by means of which an internet site automatically displays, on its own pages, a summary of the contents published on another website. By virtue of the web feed, this application has become easy to set up, since it consists, for the first internet site, simply of recovering the web feed from the other site by a conventional subscription and thus obtain a summary of the content of the other site.
Equally, the establishment of feed readers offers many possibilities for a user. A feed reader is a program to which the user will indicate certain web feeds to be monitored. This is what is called subscribing to a web feed.
The reader is then responsible for periodically recovering the web feed for the purpose of determining whether updates have been made. Where applicable, the feed reader can indicate to the user, for example by means of a dedicated display, that new data are available.
The reader can also directly display the website as periodically recovered, thus offering applications of the weather forecast, stock exchange, latest news, etc.
A notable advantage of the web stream is that, by subscribing, the user no longer has any need to go to each site in order to check whether updates have been made. This is because it suffices for him to consult his feed reader and, if some updates interest him, he can then go to the site concerned in order to obtain more details, possibly via a link directly integrated in the entries of the web feed.
The main web feed standards are known by the term RSS, standing for “Really Simple Syndication”, in the RSS version 2.0, and Atom (RFC 4287 of the IETF).
FIG. 1a shows an example of an RSS feed, in which an entry <item> (corresponding to a content element) comprises a title <title>, a link <link> (the address at which the resource can be consulted), a description <description>, a publication date <pubDate> and an identifier <guid>.
FIG. 1b shows an example of a web feed according to the Atom concurrent format, in which the presence is observed, within an entry <entry>, of a title <title>, a link <link>, an identifier <id>, an update <updated>, and a summary <summary>. The Atom format was developed to solve certain problems inherent in the RSS format, in particular concerning the data contained, the type of which can be indicated with Atom, or vis-à-vis the management of the content in several languages.
In order to guarantee effective consultation of the entries of the feeds and not overload the users with an excessive amount of information, these web feeds generally contain a limited number of entries. For example, with a limit of 20 entries, the web feed in question contains the last 20 elements of contents published.
In the mechanisms currently used, the updating of the web feed consists of adding new entries corresponding to the content elements to be published (those that have never been inserted in the web feed) as soon as these are available.
This poses a problem when content elements to be published arrive in large numbers, since the corresponding entries are then not intended to remain in the web feed for a long time. The visibility of the content elements to be published for subscribers is then seriously degraded.
For example, if there are 100 content elements to be published, only the last 20 are added to the web feed with the conventional mechanisms. Likewise, if 100 contents to be published are obtained successively, each new content to be published being obtained after a short interval of time (for example 1 minute), then the first 80 entries corresponding to the first 80 contents to be published will be only briefly presented in the feed (if a new entry is obtained at each minute, then the first 80 entries will be visible only for 20 minutes). Consequently, in both cases, it can be estimated that 80 entries do not benefit from sufficient visibility. This is because the period of consultation of a web feed by a user is generally greater than this visibility period.
Mechanisms are also known for dispensing with this barrier of 20 entries in order to broadcast information relating to a larger number of contents, in particular by grouping together several content elements in a single entry, or several entries in a single entry.
This is the case with feed aggregators that group together several web feeds in a single feed.
In a similar fashion, the site FeedStomper.com generates, from a given web feed, another web feed containing, for each day, all the new contents to be published for the day.
These approaches are however defined statically and do not make it possible to take account of the dynamics of creation of new contents to be published in order to adapt to them in particular.
The present invention aims to mitigate the drawbacks of the prior art, in particular in order to promote the rapid and visible publication of the contents in a web feed.